Power BI Best Visual Contest – 3rd People’s Choice Award!

This week has been full of excitement with amazing entries coming in every day for the Power BI Best Visual contest. We’re now just hours away from the contest submission deadline – get your entries posted by 11:59PM PST today, October 1st, 2015.

We’re excited to announce that today’s People’s Choice award goes to Breakdown Trees*. If you’ve ever wanted to see how your data rolls up to the top level numbers, the Breakdown Tree is a perfect solution.

While entries are still open for another few hours, please join us in sending our thanks and appreciation to each of our community members who spent their time, worked long and hard, and submitted an entry. They’ve all amazed us with their work. Please join us in tweeting your appreciation to the entrants to show them how much we all thank them for their entries! All you need to do is click the “Send a thank you!” link below each entry and then press the Tweet button.

Did I mention the Power BI Best Visual Contest deadline is today? You can still submit an entry but you’d better get to it. To get started visit the contest home page. There’s a total of $9,000 in prizes left, including the $5,000 Grand Prize!

The Breakdown tree makes it possible to visually display the full drill-down path of a measure. By keeping all levels in the drill-down path visible you will get a good overview of how your numbers break down, from the top level to the details at the bottom.

The Brush- or "zoomed" Line Chart, will display a miniaturized preview of the data for the provided period. Details of a measure are displayed in the top chart - the details view. The time period can be adjusted in the slicer by moving the relevant time-window. The details view will update its content accordingly allowing the user investigate the measure in more detail.

The Synoptic Panel connects areas in a picture with attributes in the data model, coloring each area with a state (red/yellow/green) or with a saturation of a color related to the value of a measure. Starting from any image, you draw custom areas using http://synoptic.design/, which generates a JSON file you import in the Synoptic Panel. You can visualize data over a map, a floorplan, a diagram, a flow chart.

This visualization shows a spark line which has colored and thickened line segments. The black colored segments mean that the value has gone up since last period (desirable), and the red colored segments mean the value has gone down (undesirable). The final segment, most recent period is thickened for emphasis. There is also an option to reverse the colors meaning if in your particular measure data, a negative value is more desirable. eg. number of faults.

The enhanced map for Power BI offers anyone a starting place who would like to incorporate the popular Leaflet JS mapping framework into Power BI. D3 provides scales to handle the fill for polygons (choropleth map) as well as optional areas for points (bubble map). A set of open source tile layers are provided with attribution to Open Street Map, CartoDB, and Stamen where appropriate. In addition, custom image overlays as well as an option for no base tiles are available. Integration of SQL Server geography is available via WKT or Well Known Text format using the .STAsText() function. This is more of a proof of concept for integrating Leaflet with Power BI, so other popular geo data formats are not currently available but could certainly be added at a later time.

Chord diagram shows relationships between entities and also a share of total for each entity. Visualization expects two attributes and value plus optional coloring value. Chord also allows for partial interactivity, by providing visual filtering for each group (opacity of all other groups is decreased).

This was my first JavaScript application, so I faced couple of obstacles that every beginner must solve, but I'm thrilled with how little is needed to deliver working piece of code. I'm curious if anyone finds this chord diagram interesting and useful for regular business analysis. Power BI rocks!

A connected node diagram is used to show the relationships between different entities. For the example below i have chosen to visually explore the relationships between users in terms of the number of messages that they have sent to each other. You'll notice the correct allocation of two different field entries for the Node To and Node From so it is easy to use from the UI perspective.

The Heatmap Visualization enables users to draw a heatmap overlay from a X, Y coordinate set on to an existing background image. The user can specify the background image, and provide a data set of X, Y coordinates and optionally an intensity for each data point. The radius and the blurriness of the heatmap bubbles can be customized as well as the max value for the intensity.

Meet the Shoot ‘Em Up Chart! It consists of a moving bubble chart where the size of the bubbles is proportional to the value of each member. Try to put out each bubble to complete the level. If you get hit, one of the already hit bubbles get lit up again. Have fun!

The hexbin scatterplot for Power BI is a variation on a traditional scatterplot that involves clustering points onto a uniform grid of hexagons. Rather than relying on size to indicate differences in values like a bubble chart, the hexbin plot instead uses variation in bin color similar to a heat map. A higher saturation or darker color indicates higher density when working with two measures. A third measure can be added so that the plot colors change from indicating point density to instead encoding the value of the third measure. Bin radius can also be adjusted.

The Voronoi Map applies Voronoi tessellation to a set of geographic points. Voronoi tessellation essentially partitions a set of points into regions such that any other point in a region is closest to the original point associated with that region. Regions are shaded according to their category, but more importantly, their relative weight. For example, in the image below, stores which have a higher sale per year are darker. Circular markers are placed at the geographic point from which the Voronoi tessellation was computed and has variable radius depending on the same weight that the shade of the region is computed with. The visual is completely interactive, as can be seen in the video. Enjoy!

This visualization is all about visualizing Key Performance Indicators. The status is presented as a color indication, comparing the actual and target values. Deviation is presented as distance in percent of actual from target. The history (trend) is presented as a line or a bar chart. It is up to the user to decide which granularity of history that should be displayed. Any dimension attributes can be used, but it’s recommended to stick to the ones in your date dimension.

The stack chart is essentially an area chart where instead of the sections overlaying each other, they are stacked on top of one another. This chart is particularly useful when analyzing the sum of values for categories with individual contributors. The visual has complete integration with PowerBI.

Labeled Histogram is a histogram with a twist. As a traditional histogram it shows the distribution of a single variable in form of the column chart. In addition to that Labeled Histogram shows the label of each data point displayed in the column itself so you can see to which histogram bin each data point belongs. As an example a distribution of the employment to population ratio across different countries is plotted.